Students at the U.S. Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Colorado, are being taught to stop scoffing at the mention of UFO’s, and to keep an open mind on the subject. This was made clear on October 1, 1970, in an interview given by Major Stewart Kilpatrick, Deputy Director of Public Information of the Air force Academy, to The Lemoore, California, Advance, in a lengthy and exclusive phone interview. Major Kilpatrick, as second ranking officer in public affairs at the Air Academy, is in a position to speak authoritatively for the Air Force. He admitted at once that plebes (freshmen) are taught from a text entitled, “Introductory Space Science, Volume II,” and an entire Chapter 33 deals entirely with UFO considerations. He quoted from page 455, that “50,000 virtually (sic) reliable people have reported sighting unidentified flying objects. This leads (sic) us with the unpleasant possibility of alien visitors to our planet,” the 14-page chapter continues, “or at least alien controlled UFO’s.”

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According to the Academy text book: “If such beings are visiting the Earth, two questions arise: 1) Why haven’t they attempted to contact us officially, and 2) why haven’t there been accidents which would have revealed their presence? Why no contact?

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That question is very easy to answer in any of several ways: 1) We may be the object of intensive sociological and psychological study. In such studies, you usually avoid disturbing the test subject’s environment. 2) You do not contact a colony of ants—and humans may seem that way to ant aliens (variation: a zoo is fun to visit, but you don’t ‘contact’ the lizards.). 3) Such contact may have already taken place secretly, and may have taken place on a different plane of awareness—and we are not yet sensitive to communications on such a plane.” In releasing this interview in the Lemoore Advance, we are well aware that many readers will certainly “raise an eyebrow or two.” But Major Kilpatrick insisted the above chapter in the text is not a fairy story. At the end, he seemed to go along with the recommendations of the physics text book, which advises Air force officers as follows: “The best thing to do is to keep an open and skeptical mind—and not take an extreme position on any side of the question.” Introductory Space Science closes the chapter with the wish expressed that renewed extensive investigation be given to the possibility of UFO’s. This will require expenditure of a considerable sum of government funds, it explained, and in the present public attitude of scorn and ridicule whenever UFO’s are mentioned, such possibility seems almost hopeless, the chapter laments.